The Uncomfortable Commerce Of Art

“It’s hard for me to figure out how I feel about or think about things. It just comes when I sit down to write. I like writing – I had a book of critical writing that came out last spring on a German press called Sternberg. That’s book’s called Is It My Body?... Certain things are more interesting to write about. It can be boring to write about yourself because you know what the story is, and it’s hard to integrate ideas about art and art practice with something that’s essentially a popular culture genre, like a memoir.

"Bob Dylan made a lot of stuff up, he’s such a mysterious figure I guess he can do that.”

“It was difficult to retell stuff you’ve said in interviews a billion times. Basically, you have to write for a broad audience... Like an editor was like ‘Describe The Raincoats.’ You don’t really want to have to do that, you want to make people have to look that up… It’s an interesting form because you can take it so many different ways. Like Bob Dylan who made a lot of stuff up, he’s such a mysterious figure I guess he can do that.”

Although Australia won't be getting a book tour or a visual art exhibition for the time being, we will get to witness Kim Gordon performing with new collaborator Bill Nace in experimental group Body/Head at Sugar Mountain and Sydney Festival. She describes working with Nace as “natural and organic”. “It’s just so fun to play with him.”

“The name was inspired by this book about this French filmmaker named Catherine Breillat. It has to do with control, your body and your mind. The book was analysing her films – there was one film about some young girl who wanted to lose her virginity and she was with this older guy and she really wanted to but she didn’t want to give up control, something like that. So it comes from there. And how your body wants one thing and your mind wants another thing.”

“It’s really about just the moment that happens, what’s created each night.”

She describes the music, including their record Coming Apart, released in 2013, as like a film soundtrack: an entirely improvised (“It’s really about just the moment that happens, what’s created each night”) show that they perform in front of projections. “At first we were using a film called Coming Apart [1969], which was an early Rip Torn movie. It takes place in his apartment and he has a camera hidden and all these different women come in and out of the apartment, and he’s slowly having a nervous breakdown. We show it in such slow motion that it looks like hardly anything is going on in the apartment. And then we collaborated with Richard Kern on a film that we were showing.”